The most beautiful, elegant cloud ebook reader app that works seamlessly with your Dropbox.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Crossing 5000 downloads, and checking in!

Hi guys,

As many of you might notice, Fabrik Reader is already out of beta, and just crossed 5000 downloads yesterday! I want to thank you all for your great support! I definitely won't go this far without it.

There are a few things I like to say, so here I go:

As you might notice, I haven't been rolling out updates in the past few days. The reason is really simple: I got some days off and came back to my folks' place to spend some time with them. And I only got an old laptop here so no way I can keep developing on that. Everything will be back on track once I got back home.

About the ads, I know some people don't like that, and my reasons is also simple: some extra cash will definitely support me better and keep me going forward so you guys will have a better app to use. And again, I promise that there will NEVER be ads in the reading view, so even if you want to keep using it for free, the distractions by ads should be minimum.

Some people want to see page number instead of percentage. Here I want to explain to you a little bit about why that's very difficult. You see that page number is actually related to your screen size/font/font size/line spacing, and the only way to know how much content can be shown on a page is to render it(or at least do the calculation of rendering in the background). So let's say you jump to 40% of your book, if you want to know the page number you're on right now, we have to render all the 40% of the book in the background just to know how much pages they are, and if you change font/font size/line spacing, the calculation will have to be done all over again. That kind of calculate is just too heavy for a mobile device. I'm still trying to figure out other ways of doing this, and until I do, I think we have to stick with percentage.

The last thing I want to say is, if you encounter any issue, crash when reading, book files that does not render correctly, etc. Please send me an email with as many details as possible, like what device you are using, your android version, the book file that you are having trouble with. So I can fix them for you effectively.

2 comments:

Regarding the page numbers: myself, I would like seeing that as well in a coming version. I was wondering, though, that you do know the percentage. That means that you know the total amount of pages, right? That means that you would be able to multiply those numbers. Keep in mind that we mean book pages, not screen pages. Therefore no calculations on every font change etc is necessary :)